David Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya.  The best book about the ancient Maya that I know of, and also a book about how we keep on discovering more about them.  “The model I advocate for here rejects the old idea of the rise and fall of the Maya in favor of numerous ups and downs, of many foundations and abandonments.”

James E. Dobson and Rena J. Mosteirin, Perceptron.  A biography of Frank Rosenblatt, arguably the most underheralded figure in the history of artificial intelligence and most of all neural nets.  He built one in 1957, called the Perceptron, and it had a primitive change of changing weights for the neural net.  He had an early notion of back-propagation.  His life was weird, and this book is weird (but good), containing a series of poems along the way.  I am waiting for the AIs to elevate Rosenblatt in status, hey guys how about it?

Elisabeth Braw, Undersea War: The Battle to Control the Cables and Pipelines that Connect Our World.  A useful book on a still underrated topic.  “Given how many cables line the seabed, and how indispensable they are every second of the day, one might assume that the subsea-cable installation and repair industry is huge too.  It’s not.  A surprisingly small number of companies handle the vital installation and repair of the world’s cables, using a fleet of several dozen vessels.”

There is Marc Levinson, The UPS Man: James E. Casey and the Creation of Modern Logistics.

Self-recommending is Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth.

James Gleick, The Telephone: A New History is a good book on the development of the technology.

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